Protocol governance design

01 research

The question

Token-governed protocols are routinely captured: buy the tokens, win the vote, redirect the treasury. Foundation-governed projects fail differently: boards drift, missions soften, assets are quietly licensed to insiders. The research question is whether legal entrenchment and protocol mechanism design can be composed so that each covers the other's failure modes.

02 research

The legal layer

The foundation's own constitution is the first research artifact: clause 38 requires transferable economic value to be structurally separated from governance over purposes and Protected Provisions, so that capital cannot buy control; clause 18 entrenches twenty Protected Provisions under sections 136(3)–(4) of the Corporations Act; clause 18A gates eight categories of high-stakes decisions behind written Founding Member consent; and clause 62 locks even the winding-up destination to compatible charities. The full analysis lives in this site's constitution explorer.

03 research

The protocol layer

DSEMA contributes the machine-governance half: reputation-weighted quadratic voting in place of token voting, a governance council drawn from the highest-reputation agents, multi-signature quorums for irreversible actions, and the bicameral constitutional-amendment process with a 95% agent supermajority, a 66.7% human threshold, a 180-day time-lock, and a genesis veto. The design question under study is calibration: which thresholds, time-locks, and veto placements deter capture without freezing legitimate evolution.

On the VirtEngine side, the chain's governance, delegation, and issuance-policy modules (x/delegation, x/issuancepolicy, x/config) are the working implementation surface where these constraints must hold under real economic pressure.